PS3 no longer hackable?

Could Sony really have fixed the unfixable? That's the conclusion of one high profile hacker after examining the latest release of Playstation 3's firmware. According to Youness Alaoui, a hacker known as KaKaRoTo, this includes an apparent patch for a security breach for which there was supposed to be no remedy.

Sony is currently suing New York hacker George Hotz, aka geohot, along with a group in Europe calling themselves fail0verflow, for publishing details of how to bypass the security features of its flagship games console, allowing pirated games to be run on it. Previously the encryption on the PS3 was considered so strong that many believed it would never be hacked.

But in December Hotz built on a technique used by fail0verflow to penetrate the PS3 security and was able to go further and obtain the root key, an encryption key at the heart of all PS3 security. So fundamental was this breach that Hotz, fail0verflow and others immediately declared that it was game over for Sony. The only way to re-secure the PS3, they said, would be to upgrade the hardware itself.

Sony appeared to agree, describing the damage caused by the hack as "irreparable" - a major argument in a lawsuit they filed against Hotz. Last week, Sony was granted permission by a court in California to access the visitor logs for Hotz's website, suggesting that its legal battle will not stop with Hotz himself.

But according to Alaoui, the new firmware, version 3.6 released earlier this week, appears to have patched the damage. "For now, it looks to me (at first glance) that the PS3 has been resecured, but it doesn't mean it can't be broken again from scratch," he said in a tweet.

It is not entirely clear how Sony fixed the hack. PS3's security is based on layers of encryption, with one layer unlocking access to the next. Hotz's hack was so devastating because he was able to access the metldr root key which undermines this chain of trust by unlocking all layers. Sony's solution appears to side step this by simply not using metldr at all, opting instead for an entirely new security system. This too could eventually be hacked but it would involve starting from scratch, says Alaoui.

But not everyone is convinced by the fix. "I would be very surprised if this fix isn't hacked fairly quickly," says Theresa Verity, a cryptologic technician, in the US Navy's Information Dominance Corps, who goes by the hacking name of Squidly1. "For the fix to really stand it has to invalidate all previous keys and that would make all previous content unplayable," she says.

But even giving Sony the benefit of the doubt, if the fix does hold, the question then is what this means for Sony's lawsuit. After all if the hack isn't irreparable, then presumably neither is the damage.

6 Comments

Why would all previous content be rendered unplayable? Pretty much all my PS3 games have had updates that needed to be downloaded, why couldn't Sony provide individual content updates so existing material can use the new encryption methods?

Of course, any decent hacker would intercept this update and find out exactly what would be necessary to crack the new security system...

Feel free to shoot me down in flames for being this guy, but I'm pretty sure you mean 'breach' rather than 'breech'

By Cian O'Luanaigh
on March 11, 2011 5:18 PM

Thanks for spotting that Lawrie, this has now been corrected in the blogpost.

bugstomper
on March 14, 2011 6:49 PM

@as2003, of course the PS3 is hackable if someone figures out a way to hack it. But until someone does it is close enough to true for a headline, which after all is just a few words to convey the topic of an article. This one can be short for "PS3, which was hackable using Geohot's discovery of the metldr root key, which hack everyone thought could not be worked around without a hardware change or disabling all existing games, is no longer hackable using that method to everyone's great surprise, and may not be hackable without a completely new hack that will have to be worked out from scratch." Now which one makes a better headline?

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